Death! Death has stalked the realm of fandom over the last three months! Yeoman Rand (Grace Lee Whitney) joins Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) in the afterworld, and King Author (Nigel Terry) now waits in Avalon for our hour of need. Heroic Fantasy Quarterly soothes the loss with a full cargo of stories and poems, including work by our own David Farney.

Fiction Contents

The Madness of the Mansa, by Cullen Groves
There are mysterious goings-on in the city of Asongai, which is a call to opportunity for a sea-wolf named Draba. Adventure, intrigue, vice and verse await! Cullen Groves may be familiar to readers of HFQ, cutting a skaldic swath through 2014 with his poems The Sword and The Lay of Hrethulf Glamirsbane.

Melting Gold and Ashes, by Dennis Mombauer
A world riven by war and revolution teeters at the brink of collapse and anarchy and pauses to celebrate one its few heroes.

The Reeds of Torin’s Field, by Andrea G. Stewart
Rounding out our fiction is a tale of bounty hunting, murder in the night, and worse than murder. Good stuff!

Poetry Contents

Morrigan’s Song, by Coleen Anderson
HFQ veteran Colleen Anderson, who has graced HFQ with poems about dragons, and mad Spanish knights is back with a poem about one of the more enigmatic of the Celtic goddesses.

Shamans, by David Farney
We all want something we all need something. We’re all selling something, but we’re not
all buying!

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Artwork

This issue’s banner art, “Wizard and Army” comes from Vuk Kostic, a Serbian artist whose spectacular work can be found here.

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Goings On
David Farney: Beset on all sides, David took time from his chaotic schedule to hammer out some awesome poetry for us this quarter.

Adrian Simmons: Has a number of short stories coming out soon at such diverse places as Plasma Frequency, Strange Constellations, Pseudopod, Outposts of Beyond, and the Post-Old-Ones-Awakening anthology Apotheosis. In preparation for the upcoming “Mad Max Fury Road” movie, he has been reviewing the original trilogy at the HFQ Facebook page.

William Ledbetter: Breaks into the pro markets (again!) with the sale of his hard science fiction story “The Long Fall Up” to the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. His story “That Other Sea” was voted best Escape Pod story of 2014. And his story “Stealing Arturo” will be included in the Year’s Best Military SF and Space Opera by Baen Books, available May 16th!

James Rowe: Things have been somewhat ho-hum for James during this last season. No new poems or stories are slated for publication in the coming months, but that ought to change as markets open their reading periods, and he throws out his proverbial (not Lovecraftian) feelers for a biting poetry publishing. Otherwise, James has been busy with calling down the powers of heathen divines to smite cheating students, and drinking far too much gin and scotch to help assist him in plowing through papers and tests to grade.

Phillip Martin’s Guide to Fantasy Literature, available from Crickhollow Books, is an excellent resource. This slim volume lays out the basics of fantasy writing, AND includes a very good section on Sword and Sorcery fiction. If you are in the writing game, this is a book you should get.

Heroic Fantasy Quarterly Volume 1

In the issue #23 editorial we boasted that we’d have our first anthology ready for the world by the time we posted issue #24… that did not happen. We gave a heroic effort, have no doubt, but the final product still has a bit to go.